Education: One Classy Failure

Parents like to hear their political candidates talk about whipping schools into shape and making them accountable. Easy to say. But not many parents have a clue how really hard it is to take on an entrenched, self-preserving education establishment.

Steve Brothers does. He's the manager of the American Greetings plant in Osceola, Ark., a hulking factory perched near the banks of the Mississippi where 1,500 workers make greeting cards. The 1984 Osceola High School graduate says he has trouble keeping his operation running smoothly because "I can't find enough people who can multiply seven times four." Nor can he readily recruit young executives from outside the area after they learn that the state put Osceola's school district on "academic distress" two years ago, when only 33% of 11th-graders could read at grade level, and only 8% were up to par in math.

Brothers, 33, tried to help the system in the small ways he could. He organized plant tours for students, hoping to stir their imagination, and even helped launch a "shadowing" program, in which high schoolers tag along with employees for a day. He became an officer of the Booster Club, which supports the district's popular athletic programs. "I couldn't get a single parent to attend a planning meeting, and we had just won a state championship in football," he says. But before ruling out the Osceola system for his five-year-old son Jackson, Brothers saw one last opportunity: to open a publicly financed charter school. Governor Mike Huckabee had signed legislation in early 1999 that would allow for as many as 12 charter schools, independent of local districts, to be established in the state. So Brothers, along with the Chamber of Commerce director, Mayor Dickie Kennemore and others settled on a plan for what they called the Arkansas Charter School. It would serve 72 kindergartners and first-graders by the fall, and its goals would be academic rigor, racial balance and parental involvement.

The charter-school advocates knew they would face resistance, but they did not expect the full-throttle counterattack they got. The first hitch occurred when the state education department took a full six months after the new law was adopted to issue 12 pages of onerous rules and regulations governing Arkansas charter schools. Even at that pace, lobbyists for the state's school boards, administrators and teachers protested that the process was moving too quickly. The bureaucratic delay left Brothers and his allies barely three months to identify an appropriate school site, draw up policies for admissions, personnel and attendance, hold a public hearing and submit a detailed application to the state.